The Folger’s ‘Pierce Penilesse’

The second guide to digitised copies of Nashe, this time examining the two editions of Nashe’s first big hit, Pierce Penilesse (1592).

While the first guide to Have with you to Saffron Walden identifies some of the visually striking features of that work, today I will make use of the fact that the Folger Library has digitised two different editions of Pierce Penilesse, to illustrate how Nashe and his publishers made changes to the text, over five different editions. These variances between different copies of the same text matter to the Nashe Project, because in each case, the editor will need to decide which choice of words to present in their new edition, and which to relegate to the footnotes, affecting the way that modern readers will be approaching this book.

Mapping Nashe

Nashe may have written his most famous work The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) about the dangers of continental travel, but his own travels were limited to England, as this interactive map shows.

You can zoom in and out of the map (using the buttons on the lower left corner) and click on the pins to find out more about Nashe’s published texts and significant life events. The pins are colour-coded to indicate different years, from dark maroons and reds at the start of his writing career, through to blue in his final years.

Or you can trace Nashe’s life in and out of print, by clicking on the  button on the top left corner, which will bring up a time-line of Nashe’s career.

Making a personalised map of a historical figure is surprisingly easy, if you want to give it a go yourself! Just go to the ‘my maps’ feature on Google maps for instructions. You can suggest any additional Nashean adventures that I could add to this map in the comments.